HouseDivided

The House Divided Project at Dickinson College aims to create resources for teachers and students that will help bring alive and explain the turbulent Civil War era in American history. We are currently annotating 150 of Abraham Lincoln’s “most teachable” documents, featured at our new website: Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition. Our annotations are generated and maintained by Prof. Matthew Pinsker and Will Nelligan ‘14. Dickinson College is a small liberal arts college founded in 1773 and located in Carlisle, PA.

Lincoln was remarkably good at mediating between audiences in his rhetoric, a talent of which this sentence is an excellent example. After spending most of the letter explaining that his tactics had nothing to do with the question of slavery and everything to do with the survival of the Union, Lincoln notes that his “personal wish” is for abolition.

None of this says anything about what Lincoln will do, just his reasons for doing whatever he does. It’s a very clever structure, especially in light of what we know now about Lincoln’s thinking in the summer of 1862. In July, he had drafted a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and discussed it with his cabinet. He was prepared to issue the proclamation, and is laying the groundwork here for the argument he would eventually make in its defense. The best evidence of that evolution is another public letter Lincoln wrote a year later, which we have annotated here.

This was a Democratic slogan in the midterm elections of 1862 — “the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was.” By invoking the Democrats here and seemingly rejecting abolitionism soon after, Lincoln, is placing himself cleanly in the middle. He seems like a moderate as a result.

This concludes a rather caustic, sarcastic opening to Lincoln’s public letter. House Divided founder Prof. Matthew Pinsker has a close reading video with more information on Lincoln’s aims here. http://vimeo.com/70711839

This is probably sarcastic. By noting that he’s waiving such things, of course, Lincoln is calling attention to them. His relationship with Greeley is also more complicated than is implied here. While Lincoln was said to have respected Greeley, he did not receive Greeley’s endorsement in the 1858 Senate race. Their relationship was a contentious one.

Greeley (1811-1872) was editor of the New York Tribune, arguably the North’s most important newspaper during the Civil War era. Greeley was a leading anti-slavery figure, an early founder of the Republican Party, and later, after the Civil War, an independent presidential candidate backed by the Democratic Party. He founded the Tribune in 1841 and enjoyed enormous success and some notoriety in the subsequent decades. By the time Greeley published his open letter to President Lincoln in the summer of 1862, the Tribune had nearly 300,000 subscribers.

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The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

Horace Greeley published an angry open “letter” to President Lincoln in the pages of Greeley’s newspaper, the New York Tribune, on August 20, 1862. Greeley was upset that Lincoln had not yet begun enforcing the “emancipating provisions” of the new Second Confiscation Act (July 17, 1862). Lincoln responded in the pages of a rival newspaper with his own “letter” to Greeley that sternly laid out the president’s policy regarding slavery. Lincoln claimed his “paramount object” in the war was to “save the Union” and not “freeing all the slaves.” Yet by that point, Lincoln had already decided (in secret) that the only way he could “save the Union” was to issue an emancipation proclamation following the next major battlefield victory.

This wasn’t the only public letter Lincoln wrote. He “sent” several in 1862 and 1863, and some scholars believe the messages had a major impact on public opinion of the President and the Civil War. We’ve annotated another, longer public letter here.